


The Last Hearth

by Tattered_Dreams



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Abuse, Arya and Sansa bonding, Arya/Gendry because its discussed and because its canon, Brutality, Canon, Character Deaths, End of the World, F/M, Family, Gen, I wanted Sansa's reaction to Gendry, ITS DARK, Manipulation, Missing Scene, Mistrust, Murder, Rape, Season 8, Siblings, Sisters, Spoilers, Trauma, Trying to heal, Violence, abuse survivors, basically anything and everything you'd expect from Westeros, but he's not in the fic, dark topics, discussion of, fucked up politics, im so sorry, its 9k of one conversation, its heavy, its kind of a deep character study, jon's a bit of an idiot, literally and contextually, ooooooh boy, sorry - Freeform, starks supporting each other, they talk about a lot of the shit they've been through so that gives you an idea, we were robbed of that tbh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-28
Updated: 2019-08-28
Packaged: 2020-09-28 20:24:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20431922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tattered_Dreams/pseuds/Tattered_Dreams
Summary: Canon compliant, missing scene from 8x02While everyone is gathering together for their final hours alive, Sansa and Arya sit together to talk, because there are things left they want to say, a lot of them, while they still can....This fic is not all dark and horrific, and not graphic, (in fact Arya's history with Gendry is a whole part) but it does raise topics of abuse and trauma that are canon to the characters' lives. Just be aware and obviously stop reading or skip any bits you aren't comfortable with.





	The Last Hearth

**Author's Note:**

> Last heads up to check the mess of tags just so you know what topics are touched on here. Some are more specific than others.
> 
> At no point is there (what I would call) graphic depictions of abuse or death itself - those parts focus on the aftermath and emotional fallout. It's not all bad.

It seems kind of a stupid thing to do. Here, in what used to be her parents’ solar, on the last night she might be alive and she’s stoking a guttering fire in the cavernous hearth. It’s barely even warm – winter is here, and the unnatural cold of the dead presses too close, soaking into the old stone of Winterfell’s walls. The fire can’t overpower it, and even the light it casts is a sickly pallor, fluttering like a weak pulse over the logs.

Sansa stokes it anyway, though it lends nothing to her. Somehow it feels like it would be worse if she didn’t; if she sat here and watched it die and let the hungry darkness pacing at the edges of the room consume her.

Arya learned to walk in shadows in the years they were apart, but Sansa didn’t. The shadows she knows are the ones under her own skin, the ones the shape of hands and the colour of bruises. The fire may not be warm, but in the bleak light of it the memory-stained fingerprints are harder to see.

She has never thought of herself as being afraid of the dark, but perhaps she is. Perhaps she learned that, too.

She can’t focus.

She’s been in a place like this before; the dark night before a battle, the wondering who would be left standing when the last sword fell and what would be made of them when the blood dried. Experience had taught her that to worry was futile. It was always for nothing anyway. It didn’t mean it was easy to stop.

There’s never been a night before quite like this one, either, though.

It’s the end of the world in a way that none of those have been.

She’ll probably be dead before the dawn ever touches what’s left of Winterfell.

And if she’s dead it almost certainly means that everyone she loves is too, but it’s a thought that is of little comfort. She isn’t sure what she’s more afraid of this time; what her death might look like, what form it will take when it comes, or if maybe she’s more scared of living through it to never again see Arya, Jon or Bran. If she’s more scared of living through it to not have a home or a family after everything she did to win them back.

“You’re thinking too hard.”

Sansa jumps in her furs. The links of the chain looped at her chest clash coldly and quickly freeze still again. She’s been training herself out of spinning to try to spot Arya but tonight it’s just them and the chill in her bones has dug deeper than the cool mask she learned to wear.

For once though, Arya isn’t hidden in the shadows, easy as that would be right now. She’s standing where the glow of the hearth just barely touches, serene and still, firelight a splash on her moon-white skin. She isn’t in her over-tunic or cloak; just close fitting leathers, inky black in the maw of the open doorway.

Arya raises an eyebrow, but it’s not even close to the look of cool, unimpressed watchfulness she’s been handing out since Jon’s return. There’s something softer in it, like an edge worn dull, only the gentleness is as honed as her scorn despite those who’d say anything like it is foreign to her.

She is thinking too hard.

“I can’t help it,” Sansa says finally.

“Will you sleep?” Arya asks.

Sansa watches her step closer. There are no rugs on the floor now – the ones left were given to the people to use in any way they could when the cloaks ran out – but despite the unyielding stone and the way it echoes all sound, Arya is silent. Sansa is no longer surprised, just grateful. It may just keep her alive. Longer than most of them, at the very least.

“No,” Sansa says, and then confides, “I don’t think I can sleep. I think I want to spend my last hours with my eyes open.”

Arya takes a slow seat opposite, nodding with distant understanding in her eyes. She’s moving with precision, a carefulness that raises a question at the back of Sansa’s throat, but she isn’t sure what it is or how to ask it.

“What about you?” she voices instead, because this one offers itself readily. “Will you sleep?”

Arya looks up. “No,” she replies, decisive. “No, I think I’d rather keep mine open, too.”

There are so many stories there. There are things Sansa knows about their time apart, and many she still doesn’t, but now that this is all they have left, the gaps don’t seem to matter as much.

“I never thought I’d come back here,” Arya says, and for a moment, Sansa half thinks she’s said it herself. Arya’s watching the fire, the weak licks of flame on logs that are charred and still somehow cold. “I left Kings Landing the day father’s head hit the steps.”

Sansa has long since stopped flinching at such coarse words. Words did little to her after looking at the very real, decomposing head impaled on a spike over the walls of the Red Keep.

Arya continues without pause, “I spent the next four years trying to get north; to Winterfell, or to Jon. And when I finally thought I’d accepted I’d never get home, I stole away further south than ever instead, traded away everything I had left; my name, my face, my sight. Winterfell became a distant dream; more a memory than a goal. And now...”

Her voice tails off.

Sansa draws in a shuddering breath and picks it up-

“Now we’re here again.” Her journey was different, and Arya knows it but that’s not what’s important now. “We’re here and we’ll die here, too.”

Silence washes over them for a moment and Sansa watches the play of light over her sister’s features before Arya says, delicately, “Some day, yes.” And then, with the faintest scoff, “Father lied at the Sept that day. He confessed to treason just so we could get back here. I don’t think this was quite what he had in mind.”

A humourless smile tugs at Sansa’s mouth.

Ned Stark; a man who’d only ever loved his family and his people and tried to do right by them, and honour had killed him. Bran had whispered to them years ago of the man he had witnessed their father execute for desertion, back in a time when he’d seen with his own eyes. He’d passed on the stories of the Whitewalkers that Ned hadn’t believed and Sansa finds a cruel, hollowing kind of irony in it. No, she knows their father hadn’t had this end for them or for their home in mind when he had thrown away that honour for their lives.

But it does make her bruised heart twist to think on everything her life became after then; everything he missed.

“Do you think-”

She cuts herself off before she can finish the question, courage sputtering in her chest like the suffocating fire and she finds she doesn’t want to ask it.

Arya will tell her the truth, and the truth is something she isn’t sure she wants tonight.

But Arya goes stiller, which is the only reason Sansa realises she had been shifting in her chair to begin with. She speaks before there’s any dissuading her. “He would be so proud of you.”

It’s not what she’d expected.

Sansa bites back the sudden sting of tears that stab at the back of her eyes with no warning. The warmth that manages to bloom beneath her heart is like the setting sun in Kings Landing from a lifetime ago; a golden-red glow that flushes underneath her skin and spills thick through icy bones even as the loss and love of it shred into her ribcage and tear at her lungs. It’s hard to breathe.

Ned had favoured Arya always. He had tried hard to hide it, but Sansa knew. A daughter could tell. It had been okay – their mother had favoured her. It had been even. But it’s the reason this means what it does now – the reason she trusts it so much.

Arya would know, and she wouldn’t lie.

“Of you, too,” Sansa says, pushing the words past the knot in her throat.

Arya makes a small scoffing sound.

“Less so,” she disagrees, though she doesn’t sound saddened by it, just practical. “You’re Lady of Winterfell now. You were Queen in the North in all but name while Jon went to Dragonstone. You learned to rule well and you put your people first. You united the North with the Eyrie again, took back our home, stopped Baelish. Father would be so proud of who you became, Sansa.”

Sansa only realises she’s crying when the first tear falls onto the back of her gloved hand, splashing on the leather, immediately cold. It’s not that she never felt like enough; she was always praised growing up, but it’s overwhelming, suddenly, to hear the quiet conviction in Arya’s voice, to hear it come from her; this sister who had never put value in titles or ruling. Blunt honesty had been her weapon at a young age. She’d learned to wield lies, too, but this levelness is an old familiarity. From her, it means something more.

Yet that thought is a reminder of everything they no longer are; of all the things Sansa herself no longer is. She lost a lot along the way.

She tries to nod, a stilted thing that jars her spine and her next words scrape at her throat. “I did do those things but there are others- things I didn’t, I should have known better-”

“If you mean the letter, then we talked about that,” Arya interjects, the sing of steel in the cut of her words. “You were played. You were a girl and Cersei had been manipulating people far better than you for years.”

“Not the letter,” Sansa says, shaking her head. “I mean...”

\- but she chokes on it.

The barking chorus of hungry dogs, the cruel pinch of teeth in her arms, in her thighs. Her fingers curled, white and bloodless in linens, tears soaking into skinned furs, freezing on her cheeks in the dawn. Horror and pain drawn slow for months like sap from a Weirwood, mixed in a sickening spiral. The memories are callous and they’re choking her-

The weight of the words fester and taste of rot the longer she tries to force them forwards, charging seconds that can’t be nearly as many as they feel in her head. The words are the same shape as the bruises that only she can still see, the bites and the breaks that were inflicted until there was no part of her that felt safe.

Arya’s expression hardens, her grey eyes like shards of flint napped into arrowheads and Sansa knows she doesn’t need to give life to the words for her to understand. It’s a relief to feel seen in this way; in the dark, by one of the few people left she trusts.

“He’s dead,” Arya says, blunt and fierce. “You killed him. Nothing he did to you will last any longer than you let it.”

There’s something instinctive there that rises up; an immediate consuming rage and storm of betrayal because it’s not _her_ – she doesn’t want to carry around everything he did like scar tissue and how dare Arya suggest that she’s _letting_ it linger this way-

The fury tears out the itch under her skin, and it’s only when it’s gone that she even realises it was there; something she had grown so used to that she had stopped feeling the rasp of it like sandpaper on her bones with every waking breath. That’s when something new breaks through; curls between her ribs and clamps on her heart. She gets it.

Arya may be gentle in some ways, but in many she is violently unapologetic. She hadn’t meant that Sansa was weak, or responsible. She meant exactly what she said. Ramsey is gone. She will never again suffer at his hand or have to endure his malice or sickness. It throws light onto what Sansa herself already knew; she is the only one who can still see the marks he left.

And that’s when she also realises that Arya said it this way on purpose. She knew it would make Sansa angry, and that with it, there might be a moment – just the space between breaths – when that was stronger than everything else, enough to drown it out for long enough to remember that she is, always has been, more than her suffering.

So she inhales, and the air quivers as she drags it into frozen lungs. Then she meets Arya’s fixed gaze and admits, “I don’t know how to start.”

Her voice creaks, but Arya smiles. There’s something a little feral in the curl of it and Sansa thinks that it’s not something that should reassure her.

“You already have,” Arya shrugs. “You’re here. He’s not. You keep living after them; that’s how you start. No one else can tell you what’s right for you after that, so don’t let them.”

It probably isn’t right, either, that in this eerie dark, the fire only serving to wash the chill towards her skirts, that Sansa suddenly feels like there’s more space in her chest than there ever has been. She’s worn a corset since she was thirteen but now the boning doesn’t crush inward with every exhale. She breathes deep and winter sings in her blood.

“How do you…” _see the scars even when they’re not on the surface, know what __this is, what it looks like, the way it crawls like spiders in my veins-_

Arya’s eyes flicker with something sad and sharp. “I’ve seen it,” is all she says, and it’s enough.

_I’ve seen other girls that suffered the same who learned to stand up and take back all of the darkest parts of their bodies and minds afterwards._

“I still killed him,” Sansa says, though now it doesn’t feel like something she could lose herself in; it feels like vindication.

Arya hears it, because she shrugs idly, that feral smile quieting in the corner of her mouth. “You did,” she agrees. “But that’s the Stark way. The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword. Father would be proud of that as well.”

Sansa’s eyes flicker as she smiles, catching over the line of Arya’s waist; so slender out of her over-tunic and looking almost off-balanced by the absence of her sword. She may be unarmed, but she is no less dangerous for it. Needle’s absence is just unfamiliar.

“You’re right,” she says. “I just think perhaps he would have expected it far more from you.”

Something flashes in Arya’s face; quicksilver and wildfire. She looks amused.

“And if anyone tries to put more than their hands where they aren’t invited then they’ll wish I had set dogs on them,” she says. “As it is, the only person who ever has was very much encouraged.”

Sansa’s mind stalls, comprehension sinking in like frost spreading up walls, prickly and jarring but fast enough to watch. Whatever she might have been going to say – something knowing, amused, exasperated – shrivels up and dies at the back of her tongue. She could have anticipated the first part; the predictable scoff in the face of perceived weakness and the idea that anyone could get close enough to cause harm any more. She never expected the admission that followed.

Silence rings in the solar, echoing dully off the bare walls.

Finally, Sansa convinces her vocal chords to work and the words come out jagged. “Arya- You. With-but….who?”

Arya shrugs, unconcerned. “The smith that Jon brought with him.”

Of the mismatched assortment of characters Jon returned home with, only one found a home in the forges. Sansa can only just place him. She never introduced herself, but she saw him arrive, has seen him at his trade even if it was rough-hewn dragonglass and not fine steel. He’s tall and lean, broad shouldered and hard working. Jon thinks highly of him – bastard boy Davos brought to him – but his opinion alone isn’t enough reassurance. She can’t tell if he is the sort of man who would know what he was being given when Arya let him kiss her; whether he’s someone who would be worth it. It’s….a little unnerving; that Arya has been so close to someone Sansa doesn’t even know.

“A smith?” she asks, stilted and holding onto that, surprise that doesn’t feel like surprise clouding her tone. Arya would have chosen a Lord if she wanted to beat someone in the training yard, not if she wanted to be kissed. She never had liked highborn boys. “Arya how did you- I mean….when-”

“Just now,” she says. “Seemed like the right time.”

Sansa’s head jerks up. “So you- you did it because you might die?”

Arya seems to weigh her words carefully before she replies, “Only a little. If it weren’t him, it wouldn’t have been anyone.”

“So he didn’t-it wasn’t his idea, then?”

Sansa realises she hasn’t worded this delicately enough when Arya scoffs at her.

“Don’t worry. He didn’t take advantage.” Her eyes flicker out towards the door, a kind of sad yet fond memory written across her face. “We both wanted to but he’s too bullheaded about propriety-” _One of you ought to be_, Sansa thinks vaguely “-to have done anything about it if we weren’t at the end of the world.”

There’s a familiarity in that which goes beyond the last harrowing weeks of preparation. There’s something there that’s far older than the day that Jon returned home with the Dragon Queen, an army and the troupe of men who went with him beyond the Wall.

“You knew him before this,” Sansa guesses.

Arya says, “He knew me before he knew I was Arya Stark.”

Arya of house Stark, daughter of a traitor, vanished from Westeros the day her father’s head hit the steps at the Sept of Baelor.

Half the continent had been at war over the fates of the two Stark girls by the next morning. Sansa was locked in a tower as Joffrey’s play thing; the same prison that taught her politics was an art, but no one had so much as glimpsed Arya for six years until the day she showed up at Winterfell’s gates in a foreign cloak and on a stolen horse.

Sansa knows some of the last three years; bits that she’s asked, fragments Arya has offered, or just what observing her gives away. No one wields a dagger the way she did in the training yard without the scars that go with learning how. Sansa knows about the faces, about the House of Black and White and just some of the deaths in Arya’s wake; a faceless, nameless girl in Braavos and the entire Frey bloodline. But there are three years still that she knows nothing of. Three years that no one else alive can account for.

Three years is a lot of time for Arya to have met a blacksmith boy without the world watching.

“Tell me?” Sansa asks.

She’s curious; more, she thinks, about where Arya was and what happened to her than about the specifics of this boy she only kissed years later, and maybe that’s why Arya agrees.

The fire splutters in the hearth, Arya’s voice washes between them and Sansa listens.

It’s not the whole story; she knows it’s not. They don’t have time for it, but even so she can feel the way Arya’s words pick around large pieces of time, events gouged out of the telling. Perhaps she feels they’re unimportant, or perhaps it’s an attempt to spare Sansa from them. It’s a largely detached recollection; from being smuggled out of Kings Landing as a boy called Arry through the massacre on the Kingsroad that led to her serving Tywin Lannister in Harrenhal.

“I was his cup bearer,” Arya says, with something of a wicked lilt to her voice. “He knew I was a girl but he never knew who I was. He caught me out in a lie once or twice. I had to work to be quick.”

“To get away?” Sansa asks, alarmed and frowning. How would Tywin have punished a low born girl for lying to him?

Arya smiles, and it’s an expression that is oddly nostalgic, in a cutting kind of way. “No. There are different kinds of speed; I was quick with words and he valued intelligence. Working for him was like honing a blade if your mind was a sword.”

“It sounds like you thought highly of him,” Sansa comments. She tries to keep her voice level, but can’t quite help the bite in it. She is a wolf, too, after all.

Arya’s reply comes slowly, carefully weighed.

“I hated him. He was ruthless, cruel and underhanded, but I respected him, I think. He treated me well when it wouldn’t have been worth the effort. I’m not stupid; if he knew who I was he’d have either had me killed or locked up and used for ransom. I’m glad he’s dead. If I’d had the chance I probably would have tried to kill him myself, and been caught, too, but looking back now...I don’t regret that I chose to learn from him instead.”

Sansa absorbs that. It’s something she can uniquely understand.

“I think I feel the same about Cersei,” she says, a low murmur, because even admitting it feels sullied in some way. The truth of it holds, though. Cersei, for all her waspish cruelty, her potent streak of malice, had taught her a lot and it left a certain kind of unwanted respect.

Arya continues her tale. The escape from Harrenhal (“The guards were dead. It’s not important,” is all she says of how she managed it), the subsequent ambush by the Brotherhood without Banners and then being half held hostage and half inducted to their crew as they tried to navigate the Riverlands.

“They were trying to get me to Robb, to ransom me back,” Arya shrugs, which answers the question of if the Brotherhood knew who they had found. “Then we met the Red Woman.”

“The Priestess from Asshai,” Sansa nods. She can picture her perfectly; all blood reds and pale skin untouched by the cold even in the deep snow and ice of Castle Black. It was a kind of magic Sansa had never seen, but she suspects the unnaturalness of it would have stood out even in the Riverlands.

“The Brotherhood sold Gendry to her.”

“Gendry?”

Arya glances up. “My friend.”

_The blacksmith._

It’s the first time Arya has said his name. It’s the first time she’s said any name other than Tywin’s.

“It’s the first time you’ve said his name,” Sansa tells her.

“It’s my story, not his,” Arya replies, somewhere between pointed childish reproach and easy nonchalance. But pointing it out breaks something loose and Arya’s shoulders set. “What do you want? To know that he was the first person who stood up for me even though I could already do it myself? To know he was the only one who would fight back against me, even after he learned my name. That he he blushed like a maid when he first found out because he’d been swearing in front of me for weeks.” She pulls in a breath. "That he was the only person who ever knew who I was who never tried to use it for themselves?”

“Yes I want to know all of that,” Sansa exclaims. The words echo off the barren stone, shiver in the windowpanes and sing as they twist around the icicles on the eaves. Too loud. It was too loud, but Arya falls silent. Sansa swallows hard, clenches her gloved fingers tight into her skirts and says, measured this time, “His name is Gendry. He’s a blacksmith. He went north of the Wall with Jon and he….travelled with you, for a time. Is that- Was it-”

“We were children,” Arya says, a reminder that’s touched with disdain.

“And you were friends,” Sansa continues, like she hasn’t heard it. “I’m not implying anything. I just want to understand….who he was to you.”

Arya is silent for a long moment. The deadness left when their words have gone feels thick, fills the space and pushes out the air.

Then she says, “He was my family.”

Sansa doesn’t get it entirely. There’s something in the admission that runs deep; wounded but enduring. Maybe it’s just not something Sansa is meant to understand. It’s not hers. She’s just glad Arya had someone, for a time.

“And the Red Woman took him,” Sansa says. “And you….”

“Ran away from the Brotherhood after. Was captured by the Hound – who also wanted to ransom me back to Robb and Mother.”

It’s the tonal equivalent of an eye-roll, and it almost makes Sansa smile. The repetitiveness must have been more annoying for Arya back then than the idea of being held for money at all. There’s also something to be said for the fact that Arya left known travelling companions to brave a very long journey alone all because they sold her friend. Sansa doesn’t say it.

Arya sucks in a breath and then says all in a single exhale, “So he took me to the Freys and we arrived just in time for the massacre.”

Sansa’s own next breath goes still and dies in her lungs, shaking horror freezing like ice in her veins.

Arya was there.

Sansa was haunted by enough nightmares just hearing the stories that spread up from the Twins after the Red Wedding; crude retellings of the severed wolf’s head and laughing rumour of the dying wails. The dreams and insomnia lasted months, creeping into her bed and her mind and tearing at her, each worse than the last. It got better, until the time that something worse started finding it’s way into her bed and her world burned down to survival with no space left for dead brothers and mothers. The stories were bad, but her little sister had been there, crouched in the shadows watching the blood spill with her own eyes.

“Arya-” Sansa starts, the name cold in her mouth, a dead end with no words ready to follow.

Arya shakes her head. “I don’t want to talk about it. Not today. The Hound got me out, took me to the Eyrie but Lysa was dead-” Sansa just nods; the story of her murder is one they’ve already shared “and then Brienne found us. I left the Hound for dead and took a ship to Braavos as soon after then as I could. What came next you know.”

“The faces,” Sansa says, to confirm this, though they both know it was more complicated than that. “And you never told anyone about your time in the Riverlands. You never even brought up his name again.”

They’re back to Gendry.

Arya’s expression is shuttered; streaked with the memory of pain. “I thought he’d been killed,” she murmurs.

Sansa frowns. “The Red Woman bought him and you thought she wanted to kill him?”

Arya’s eyes are dark as she gazes back. “If all she’d wanted was someone to warm her bed there were more willing men that wouldn’t have cost her, and ones she wouldn’t have had to cross Westeros to find.”

Sansa has to concede that they’re good points, thought it raises other questions about just why a servant of the Lord of Light would seek out a blacksmith boy wandering the Kingsroad.

And that’s when something else clicks into place and more follow; fragments half buried in memory like cogs eroded with rust learning they still work.

“The Red Woman served Stannis,” Sansa says. Her voice quivers in the cold and Arya’s eyes are wary. Sansa swallows. “Davos knew her and he told me things. About the Princess Shireen. About how she was burned. Because she had Kings’ blood.”

Arya goes very still, her expression turns as cold as winter. “Don’t,” she says.

Sansa swallows again, presses on even though her tongue feels heavy. “I was with Cersei, years ago, her plaything, when she ordered the Goldcloaks to massacre children. I wasn’t told why, but it was the worst kept secret in the Keep. Baratheon bastards.”

Arya’s voice is tight with warning, “Stop.”

“You said it yourself,” Sansa points out, rushed, when Arya makes no move. “The Red Woman travelled across the continent to find him. Davos knows him; Jon said the Onion Knight introduced them, and the ambush you survived that got you sent to Harrenhal – it was Goldcloaks, wasn’t it? They were tipped off that he was sent with you.”

Arya is shaking her head. Sansa’s heart breaks for her a little.

“Arya-”

“You can never say anything,” Arya cuts her off, hard.

Sansa blinks. “You knew.” It’s not a question.

Arya doesn’t move for a moment, and then finally, the steady consideration in her eyes cracks and she rolls them upward. “I knew.” She fixes her attention back on Sansa, her slight body in the chair looks like a honed blade in the dark. “No one else ever can.”

Sansa thinks back to the only moment Jon had mentioned the smith. It was the same time he had delivered a report of the expedition beyond the Wall, and told them where the men would be best put to work.

“We’ve got lowborns and bastard sons, lords and criminals,” Jon had said to the council hall. “They’ve all got skills we need.”

“He’s a bastard boy who’s been a smith all his life,” he had said of Gendry. “He’s already asked to be put to work in the forge. He’ll do good there.”

He had known Gendry was a bastard but there was more unsaid in the slide of his eyes and the way he’d darted onto the next topic. Sansa had thought nothing of it then; there had been no reason to, but now-

“It may be too late,” she says, just barely loud enough that she can hear her own words. Arya’s gaze snaps up but she says nothing, waits. “Jon knows who he is. I’m sure he does. And Jon...”

“Is bad at keeping secrets,” Arya says, slow and chilled. Her fingers dance, absent-minded across her hip, curling into a fist when they don’t find the handle of her catspaw dagger.

Sansa knows that’s the truth. For a brother she’d always thought of as remote and stoic growing up, it seemed he really trusted far too easily. If Jon already knew about this, then- “Gendry’s in danger.”

Arya’s eyes flicker up to hers but her expression is fathomless. “We all are,” she says, purposefully even. “It’s the end of the world.” Sansa barely opens her mouth to insist Arya be serious before her little sister is waving her off. “I know,” she amends. “But it won’t matter what Jon tells anyone else if we all die tonight.”

She’s right, of course, but it makes another realisation trip across Sansa’s mind.

“Jon doesn’t know about you.”

Arya frowns at her. “What do you mean?”

_Right. That wasn’t easy to follow_.

Sansa straightens, laces her fingers together, rubbing to chase the chill away. “Jon knows about him; I’m sure of that, and he can’t keep a secret. But has he tried to ask you about your smith once? He’s never mentioned anything to me, he’s not asked Bran to confirm anything. Jon missed you, Arya. A lot. If he had been told anything about what happened to you before you came home, he would have asked more.”

Arya hasn’t moved and her face looks impassive but Sansa can see her through it; knows her enough, still, just, to see the hairline fracture of vulnerability in her.

It’s almost reassuring to know her little sister – violent, deadly – is still capable of human weaknesses.

“Your smith might have told Jon about his blood, but he kept you a secret.” Sansa is suddenly sure of it. She watches Arya swallow carefully and there’s a burst in her heart, so jarring, fever bright and ice scalded that she doesn’t know if it’s healing or breaking. She can’t work out if she’s jealous or grateful. “He’s probably never told anyone.”

Arya shifts uneasily but all she says is a quiet, “He’s not _my smith_.”

Sansa doesn’t dignify that with an argument, just a solid fact, unyielding as a broadsword even if it is whispered. “No. He’s the son of Robert Baratheon.”

Arya looks furious. Her eyes dart to the doorway, but they are as alone as it’s possible to be in this still-private part of the castle. It’s the only reason Sansa said it aloud. Hearing it makes it almost…funny, even though nothing is.

Arya’s voice catches, almost annoyed and yet broken open. “I chose a bastard boy,” she says. “It’s not my fault he turned out to have the blood of a king.”

Sansa, against all odds of their dire situation, wants to laugh. “Father would be proud of that, at least.”

It makes Arya snort. It’s the closest she has looked to a living, breathing girl in a long while. It’s a relief to see it, something real in a world that’s fading away.

“I doubt it,” she says, amused but edged.

Sansa can’t work out that tone. “Well,” she says, frowning. “I suppose it would depend on why you kissed him.”

Arya shoots her a look that’s a little unnerving; narrow, shrewd and assessing. Sansa watches and waits and listens to the wind rattle and the fire splutter.

“I spent years in Braavos,” Arya says finally, “watching death happen to people. I stood by and let it; sometimes I caused it. And now I’m here, and the night before we all die I wanted to now what it might feel like to truly be alive. I don’t think either of us ever got that from the day we left here.”

The words echo in the empty chambers of Sansa’s heart. It feels like the cage of her ribs is already the husk of a ruin the same way Winterfell feels more like a tomb than a fortress.

_Truly be alive_.

It speaks of something more.

“You laid with him,” she says finally, forcing the truth of it up out of her throat, setting the weight of spoken words to it in the hopes it will make sense more than it does in her mind.

If she had thought that all it had been was a rash and clumsy first kiss, maybe a wandering hand, then this last thing – truly alive – would have disabused her of the notion. This is far more, far bigger.

“I did,” Arya says. If there was a hint of bite before, there are now wolf’s teeth in the steel of her voice, bared and sharp. “And I will again, would again, and if you even think of doing anyth-”

“What would I do?” Sansa asks, interrupting the cool words before they shape themselves into a threat.

Sometimes it’s still eerie, that the impassioned rage of her little sister has turned to honed ice. Still, the defenciveness rankles even though she knows it’s automatic; a learned response from years as a Stark daughter because if they were anywhere else, the concern might be valid. This is exactly the kind of thing that would have ruined her potential and honour, have put a stain on her virtue as a lady of an old, noble house. It’s something that would have horrified their mother and set off whispers and discord among their brothers and yet-

Sansa doesn’t care.

Their class difference, in birth if not in blood, and the lack of a marriage were things that would matter more if they weren’t about to look death in the face. And if Arya herself wouldn’t have stabbed anyone who told her it couldn’t happen.

“I won’t do anything to him,” she says.

They’re both kind enough not to mention again that the coming army of the dead could easily take the decision out of her hands and most likely will.

“I have been married twice,” she continues, softer, though Arya knows this already. She wants to make Arya understand that even if they weren’t waiting for the end of the world, she would say the same. The words catch in her throat as she pushes them out, the ghost of fingers digging into bruises long-gone. “And if I could have stopped either of them sooner, I would have. I never knew anyone I would have wanted to be with like that but now I know what it is to be forced. I will never do that to you.

“Even when this is over, if we are still alive, I will never ask you to be sold like I was.”

Arya stills, eyes icy and dark with a wintery rage.

“You know I’ll never let that happen to you again, either,” she says. Her voice sounds like poison. She is aconite, strychnine and lye in the shape of a girl. “If they ever try again and you are not happy, your intended won’t live long enough to stand at an alter.

“We were born Starks and we’re the last now.” Arya leans forward, and her face softens in the pallid flutter of the flames. She says, “You’ll keep your name until you find another you do want.”

Sansa hears the promise underneath it. Years ago it would have horrified her but for all the years she spent thinking of her little sister as a brat, as unladylike and improper, she’s never felt safer than she does now.

After all, Olenna had poisoned Joffrey to spare Margaery from his evil. Sansa hadn’t had that then; she had been confined to court politics for protection and eventually even those had failed her. Now she has Arya, and Arya has her.

“This is something that mother, at least, would be proud of,” Sansa notes with a thread of humour. “Us, getting along. Actually watching out for each other. It’s what she wanted.”

Arya smiles quietly. “My sewing has improved,” she concedes, though the twist of her mouth carries rather more mischief than sentiment. “Though I’m not sure Mother pictured me stitching my own wounds with those lessons.”

It’s not truly funny, but Sansa laughs anyway. Perhaps this is where the hysteria begins.

Winter howls through the halls. The fire claws at the last blackened shards of the logs.

“What happens after?” Sansa asks the hearth.

It’s a wishful hypothetical and nothing more, but Arya acquiesces.

“We kill Cersei.”

“And after that?”

This is a hypothetical that feels dangerous to voice but still Arya allows it.

“Then I suppose there will be a new queen,” she says, deliberately neutral and flat.

Sansa darts a glance to the doorway but it’s still a yawning black chasm onto the empty halls of the most private parts of the castle. Only Jon or Bran would be close enough to hear them. Bran hears everything anyway, and Jon headed off to the Crypt some time before. So she swallows and turns back to Arya.

“Do you trust her?” she asks, a bare whisper. “The Dragon Queen?”

“I don’t trust anyone,” Arya replies simply, with the air of someone to whom this is a familiar answer and at least mostly a truth. “I trust she’ll rule better than a Lannister. I trust that she can win the throne. I don’t trust her as a ruler, not yet.”

“She has a ruthless streak,” Sansa says, trying to keep her voice level. “A dangerous one.”

“I heard stories of her time in Meereen while I was in Essos,” Arya says. “They say all Targaryens are either beloved or insane. I guess we’ll know which she is when it’s too late.”

“She is the rightful queen,” Sansa sighs. “Let them make what they want of Kings Landing; I only care that this never happens to the North again.”

There’s an odd look on Arya’s face; wondering and shuttered and cautious. Sansa watches her smooth her brow as she forces her thoughts aside.

She says, “Targaryens won it in war. Robert won it back in war. Cersei sits on it because she outlived her Lannister children in a war and took it. The Iron Throne doesn’t care who has a claim, if anyone even does. It simply lets the next fool take it from those that are left.

“Danaerys was raised to believe it was her birthright, so I don’t think she really cares about that. It could make her a good ruler. Or the worst one.”

Sansa knows she’d prefer that the Dragon Queen took the throne and turned out to be just what Westeros needed, but she’s spent years now, being passed off and smuggled across the Seven Kingdoms at the whims of people with more power and knowledge than her. She knows that just because you want something to be doesn’t mean that it is. And what she’s seen of Danaerys Stormborn so far worries her. She has a good heart and a sharp mind, but also a coldness that doesn’t belong in the bones of a child of fire.

“We need to be careful,” Sansa says, instead of voicing all of this. If she’s noticed then Arya has as well. “She has a lot of people who love her. Jon loves her. This family has already lost enough.”

“Jon already gave her the North,” Arya reminds. “He’s no longer our king and we have bigger problems right now, but that doesn’t mean that the people can’t crown another in his place if we survive and Danaerys doesn’t do what’s best for us.”

Months ago, when the two of them had been playing Baelish, Sansa had suggested using Arya’s favouritism of Jon as kindling for the fire. Everyone knew Arya loved him best; it would be a believable bone of contention between them. But they had talked carefully about how they would stage everything, and Sansa knows just how much of that was for show and how much was Arya herself.

She hadn’t wanted Jon pushed out of a crown unfairly for the wrong reasons, but Arya had said herself that he was an idiot to have left. That’s how the men in their family had always died, and to rule the North he should have stayed there.

“Who would you have them crown then?” Sansa asks, mildly curious. “Bran won’t-”

“You,” Arya interrupts, frowning like that should have been obvious. “There’s no queen I’d sooner serve than you.”

Sansa blinks, sharp resolution stabbing between her ribs like a knife as all the air rushes from her lungs.

“I never thought I’d hear you say anything of the sort,” Sansa says when she’s pulled in another breath and feels steadier again. “That you think I’d make a good queen or that you’d serve one.”

Arya looks momentarily wistful as she says, “Valar Dohaeris.” and then immediately translates where once she might have gloated over knowing something Sansa didn’t, “All men must serve.”

Recognition sparks somewhere at the back of her mind. It’s a phrase she’s heard among the Unsullied, and some of the travellers that Jon brought home. It’s High Valyrian, most often a response to-

“Valar Morgenris?”

Arya stifles a laugh. “Morghulis,” she corrects. “All men must die. You’re picking it up.”

“Not well,” Sansa smiles. “Where did you?”

“The Kingsroad,” Arya replies, which is no answer at all. Not everyone just meets a person who speaks High Valyrian walking the Kingsroad. “It doesn’t matter. Not anymore.”

Sansa guesses that much is true.

“You wouldn’t serve the Dragon Queen, then?” she asks, shifting back to their careful ideal of a future.

Arya’s gaze twists and grows dark. “I belong in Winterfell,” she says bluntly. “She can sit on her throne and whether she rules the North or not, we are the ones who will rebuild it; everything from the Neck to the Wall. We’re the ones who are here.”

The Wall has fallen and the dead march on them, but right now, they’ve seen none of it. It’s odd to be thinking of everything they will need to do to reinstate a kingdom when at this moment, it’s quietly existing onward, just as it has done for the last thousand years. Yet it’s easy to picture; the chilling cold won’t be ignored. It claws into furs and soaks into bone; deeper and darker than the North has ever been.

Sansa wonders if they can feel the cold in the Red Keep yet.

She spent so long trying to get home and now, in just a flash of a moment, she misses the red setting suns of the South. She misses Robb and Rickon and Bran, because even he never truly came home. She feels like she missed so much of her family; her Mother journeyed all across Westeros, Bran became something else in a place where men don’t walk, Rickon survived for years in the North as it was stolen from them and still never got to return. Robb went to war and outwitted the Lannisters at every turn, enough that his bannermen handed him back a title their ancestor had long given away. Then he was slaughtered. There are so many stories there she’ll never get.

“I’d like to go to Essos, after all this,” Sansa says. Perhaps it’s impulsive, but if this isn’t the time for that she doesn’t know what is.

She’s the one who always wanted to go south. Arya never wanted to leave at all but it was her – this girl with winter in her bones and wolfs-blood in her veins who grew up there. It’s stupid to think that standing in unfamiliar streets in Braavos might help her feel like she hadn’t missed as much, but she wants to try.

“I’ll take you,” Arya says. “Some day.”

Braavos feels like a dream; a world away.

Sansa smiles, lets the thought of a sun-drenched city she has never seen warm her for a moment. But- “There must always be a Stark in Winterfell,” she says, regretful.

“There will be,” Arya says. Her tone is even and sad, just a hint apologetic. “If Winterfell is still here.”

Sansa feels herself sobering. The fire is down to little more than embers on broken charcoal. Wind catches in the slotted windows between panes of glass and whistles. The game is done and they’re back at this barren edge of the world.

“You said you wanted to stay awake,” Arya says, “But are you going to stay here?”

Sansa pushes herself to smile; the humour is real, but the pull at the corners of her mouth feels foreign and out of place. “Why, you want to get back to your blacksmith? Did you just steal away and leave him behind, anyway?”

Arya ignores it, a clear sign this isn’t a topic she will allow. Her expression stays the same. “I want to make sure that when I leave you won’t spend your last hours alone here. You should be with the living. For as long as you can.”

Sansa swallows, sobered and cold as ever as the words burrow into her chest.

She thinks of everything that waits outside of the room; the halls of their childhood home that feel hollow and emptier than ever even though this is the most people the castle will ever hold at once. She never realised how much the rugs and tapestries muffled the natural echo of it until they had all been given out to cloak the armies and now every footstep reverberates. She thinks of the way winter breathes inside, ice on the stone and in the wood. The wind that claws shivering chimes out of frozen icicles on the eaves, the silvery ring of it sounding more like wardrums.

Her mind drifts to the buzz and murmur of the courtyards where the men gather; Unsullied and Free Folk, Northmen and Dothraki, Night’s Watch and Ironborn-

She thinks of Theon, unexpectedly. He failed her and hurt her, lied to her and witnessed the darkest moments of her imprisonment, but they were wounds left long ago. He also saved her life, risked his own and returned here, knowing he’d probably never leave, just to fight in her name. The army are here for Jon and Danaerys. The Free Folk fight for themselves. Arya is here for war and for Winterfell. Bran is here for the Night King. The Knights of the Eerie came for her, but they’re fighting for the North. Theon is here only for her.

“I will be,” Sansa says finally. “I think...I want to see Theon.”

Arya surveys her for a moment, but when she speaks, it isn’t to offer an opinion on the matter. “He was in the West facing courtyard when I came across. He’s probably still there.”

“Thanks.”

Arya nods, rises from the seat, and turns to go, silent as ever.

“Arya?”

Her little sister stops, looks back, and for the first time, a faint flash of impatience steals across her face. Sansa is actually kind of glad for it; glad that she found someone she wants to go back to. It gives her the stab of courage she needs to ask-

“What- what was it like?”

Arya stills. Sansa swallows, curls her fingers tighter together to stop them trembling.

“I don’t want you to take this the wrong way,” Arya says, voice scratching like the wind on the window panes. “But I don’t want to tell you.”

Sansa’s breath rushes out, shaken and she manages to nod. “Of course. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked-”

“Sansa,” Arya cuts her off, boldly. “It’s not because it’s secret, or personal or-” she half scoffs “-inappropriate. It’s because I don’t want to upset you by bringing up old memories or by making you wish things were different. Especially not tonight. It won’t do you any good to know. And...” she draws in a shuddering breath that betrays her. Sansa gets a glimpse of how much this decision is cutting her; the thought she might have chosen wrong in keeping this away. “And what it was for me...doesn’t mean that’s what it would have been for you, even if you had chosen.”

“It’s okay,” Sansa says. She understands it, loves her for it.

“If we survive, I’ll tell you,” Arya promises. “When you have the time to deal with the ghosts.”

Sansa swallows and lifts her eyes, manages to smile – a fragile thing in the gloom. “Was he at least gentle with you?”

“No,” Arya says, but it’s firm and sure and she continues before Sansa can begin to worry, “But I didn’t want him to be. Not in the way you mean. I wasn’t gentle with him.”

“But it was what you wanted?” Sansa checks, has to know, to set this tiny piece of her mind at ease. “He was?”

“It was what I wanted,” Arya confirms, gently, like she knows Sansa just needs to hear it.

She chose the words carefully but Sansa can see through them. It’s a translucency bought, in large part, by their long talk over the fire, and the knowledge she has of everything that came before this decision Arya made – that they both made.

Arya won’t say _He was_; not when they live in a world where people knowing who you care for is only ammunition. Especially not when that world could also take him from her in just hours anyway. She won’t expose a wound that way, because that’s what he is. But it doesn’t change that Arya would never have gone to him, allowed him, if it wasn’t the person she had wanted just as much, if not more than the act itself.

Sansa swallows the renewed rush of stale envy that comes with a dull, longing edge.

She hasn’t had thought for love since Kings Landing. All of those girlhood dreams of crowns and kings were beaten out of her, dangled before her, and ripped away. More than once. After Ramsey, she hadn’t wanted any of it any more anyway.

Now she clings to what Arya said, as she watches her younger sister disappear, swallowed by the dark.

She’s already survived Ramsey, and surviving him is everything she needs to start living again.

Arya’s gone – back to the bastard blacksmith that she chose, regardless of his blood, and for the first time in years, Sansa wants to live long enough to battle the monsters under her skin. She wants to live long enough to chase them out, be strong enough to keep them gone, even if she opens her heart again. She wants to be brave enough for it. Wanting it, even if she’s not ready yet, that’s another part of the battle. It has to be.

She gazes into the embers in the hearth for a moment, barely enough to see by now, and then reaches out, dousing what’s left with the water from the pail on the flagstone.

The solar plunges into viscous darkness and the wind snarls in the windows, a song of ice that stirs up the deepest parts of the North.

Sansa stands.

This is her home, and she knows it’s walls by heart. She knows the shape of it, the memories under her feet and the history between the cracks of cement. She knows the colour of the laughter in the old wall sconces and the taste of the grief in the ceiling beams. In the black, her childhood is technicolour. She heads for the courtyard, guided only by her own footsteps and muscle memory, leaving the deathly chill in the Solar with her family’s ghosts.

**Author's Note:**

> Wow. This was an insane thing.
> 
> It was mostly an accidental project initially inspired by my love for Arya and Sansa and my disappointment that they didn't get a real moment before the battle. It sort of evolved into something far bigger that was just as much an inner exploration of Sansa, and, through her, Arya, as it was about the conversation itself.  
I also just wanted the recognition of Sansa's journey, and for Sansa to react to finding out about Gendry. We were robbed.  
It was frustrating at times, but I'm glad it's out there now.  
I know it's also very dense and heavy and static. Sorry about that. It is what it is but I know it won't be the easiest read for everyone. In many ways, it isn't meant to be.  
Thanks if you made it this far.


End file.
